Higher end of a tier tends to stop seeing two tiers below and more often sees two tiers above now and then, vice versa from low end. At least that’s my experience

And yeah the variation in eating is pretty jarring. I started paying very close attention to what rank each player was during team lineups to play around this. Ranking is FAR from a perfect determination of how good a player is, but it’s still the best metric you have at the start for judging how valuable a teammate is or how threatening an enemy is

I would always choose to tunnel a diamond or crystal ranked player that was low over the plat ranked one on the enemy team. I would always choose to save the diamond whm over the gold 1 rdm if I had to choose. It made a pretty big difference in how fast I climbed once I started doing that